[BB] 2010 Game Hint #1

[Joe Schornak]

After careful examination of the object, I have concluded that it is, in fact, a track. [Insert Admiral Ackbar Here]

The little nubby-things towards the ends of the pipes will lock into a larger rail assembly. The small angle of the Lexan and the rounded cut in the top edge of the piece allow balls to roll along it,

Beyond this point, there are two possible functions of the object within the track assembly:

1. It's a support for the track. The transparent material is not, in fact, Lexan, but a solid-state transparent titanium alloy, allowing the delicate-looking support to withstand the high stress of any gameplay.

2. More likely, the Lexan serves as a mounting point for some sort of ball-counting sensor. This would allow accurate real-time scoring of large numbers of balls. It could include a color sensor, in which case the balls are multi-colored and worth different values for each color.

I envision a track system mounted above the driver stations on each end of the field (assuming normal field shape) or on the sides where the payload special1sts were in 2009. Balls start at some central point in the field, and must be collected by the robots and placed or shot into some sort of recepticle, whereupon they fall onto the track and roll past the ball counter into a return device. Balls are worth different point values depending on their color, and perhaps begin in different places based on their color, with the high-value ones the most difficult to collect.

Of course, this is probably all wrong, and the object will be used as some sort of judging device in the pits. FIRST would do that, just to spite us.

More to come after further thought.